Serge Ibaka spoke to Adrian Wojnarowski on a recent podcast about his opportunity in Toronto and what went wrong with the Orlando Magic.
The Orlando Magic entered the season with big expectations.
They remade their roster in drastic ways and promised this would be the year they made the Playoffs. They pushed in for a defensive identity.
That started with perhaps the team’s biggest and most drastic move. The Magic’s decision to trade Victor Oladipo, Domantas Sabonis and Ersan Ilyasova for Serge Ibaka. It was an audacious move that seemed to fill one of the Magic’s most desperate needs. He seemed to be a perfect fit.
The Magic muddied the picture some with the moves they made in free agency. But the idea with Ibaka anchoring the team’s defense always seemed sound. Defense could be a gateway to the Playoffs, the team figured.
That plan fell flat on its face. The Magic showed signs of life defensively in the first quarter of the season, but the rope quickly slipped. Ibaka did not make the immediate defensive impact the team expected.
Orlando fell in the standings and the season was quickly lost.
That meant the Magic’s experiment with Ibaka had to come to an end. The team could not afford to lose him in free agency this coming summer. Orlando had to make sure the team recouped some value, especially after giving up so much.
Orlando traded Ibaka to the Toronto Raptors for Terrence Ross and a first-round pick a week before the deadline. In all, Ibaka averaged 15.1 points and 6.8 rebounds per game in 56 games with the Magic.
It was a disappointing tenure. Ibaka said publicly and still says he intended to stay in Orlando for a long time. By all accounts, he wanted Orlando to be his home.
For the first time since the trade, Ibaka spoke publicly about his time in Orlando and the disappointment from the first half of the season.
Last week, Ibaka joined Adrian Wojnarowski on the Vertical Podcast with Woj to discuss his end in Oklahoma City, his reconciliation with his daughter and his past in Orlando:
"“There was pressure because of all the pieces they traded for me to be there,” Ibaka told Wojnarowski when he asked about the lack of pressure to win in Orlando. “We wanted to make the Playoffs. Things didn’t go a different way. There’s pressure.“At the moment, I was excited to play with Biz and to play with Vuc,” Ibaka continued with his reaction to the Bismack Biyombo signing. “Maybe you’re thinking, we’ll manage a little bit to play small ball. It’s time to change now. The game is fast now. You have a center who shoots threes now. The game has changed now.”"
With the Magic playing better smaller these days, there might be some regret to how the team was built. Ibaka and Bismack Biyombo struggled to play together. It was one of the more surprising miscalculations. When the Magic had both Ibaka and Biyombo on the floor together, the team’s defense went into the tank.
Orlando never tried Ibaka at center very much. He played just five percent of his minutes at center in Orlando, according to Basketball-Reference. He is playing nearly half his minutes in Toronto at center.
The Magic are thriving now playing smaller too. The team has crept closer to the statistical profile of a .500 team since the trade deadline.
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The half-season-plus with Ibaka is going to be viewed with disappointment. The Magic did not play to the level they expected. And so the team moved on wondering what could have been instead.